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An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"[California state leaders] have rallied around a plan to build a 520-mile high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, cutting the trip from a six-hour drive to a train ride of two hours and 38 minutes. And they are doing it in the face of what might seem like insurmountable political and fiscal obstacles. The pro-train constituency has not been derailed by a state report this month that found the cost of the bullet train tripling to $98 billion for a project that would not be finished until 2033, by news that Republicans in Congress are close to eliminating federal high-speed rail financing this year, by opposition from California farmers and landowners upset about tracks tearing through their communities or by questions about how much the state or private businesses will be able to contribute."

We kind of frown upon the slave labor that the Chinese and Irish (and others) that were used to build the railroad. If I remember my history correctly, the US government gave the train Barons the land and I think subsidizing them. There was very little population (aside from American Indians) out west. It will probably take 20 years to settle Eminent Domain cases and another 10 to build the rail lines.
I worked on a survey crew to build an outer loop around a mid sized city. The first survey was done in 1984, I worked it in 1998 and they didn't start building until 2003. We did have a few fun run-ins with angry landowners and their shotguns.

If I remember my history correctly, the US government gave the train Barons the land and I think subsidizing them.

The US Government did give the land for the railroad and every other section adjacent to the railroad to the railroad companies - in exchange for reduced cost transport (freight and passenger) for government business. Considering that the land that the government kept was essentially valueless without transport access, it was a pretty good deal for both sides.

It makes an interesting comparison with Japan's new high speed maglev track. It is scheduled to be running by 2025 at over 500Kph. The terrain is difficult and there are major issues with noise pollution that increase the cost, but when it comes to buying land they realised that it is often cheaper to just elevate the track. Less disruption and no need for dangerous crossings.

Elevated track also makes it easier to keep the whole thing level when you would otherwise have to do a lot of digging to flatten the ground below normal track out. IIRC the spec for Shinkansen (bullet train) track is something like no more than 6mm height variation over 10m.

When does it happen that the property is taken away not from somebody who is wealthier and given to somebody who is less wealthy, but the other way around?

The elephant in the room is that that land was taken from the native Americans for no compensation in the first place. Taken by the government and either given or sold the forebears of the people who have possession of it now. And you can't call the reservations "compensation" in that the native Americans already owned the reservation land, and the rest of it too.

Property is theft? That's interesting. Say, do you know anybody with a house that is paid out? Did they steal the house?

They bought it from someone who stole it.

Do you know anybody with a car they paid out? Did they steal it?

Did the car company make the raw materials that the car is constructed of? No, they are a finite earth resource, made long before the company existed. They stole them. Or rather the mining companies stole them and the car company bought stolen goods. There is no reason those materials should belong to them any more than anyone else.

Do you know anybody with a toaster oven they own? Dirty thieves.

No I don't.

For every piece of land and every raw material on earth, at some stage somebody just said "this is mine". Usually with the violence, often killing people. Most land has actually been stolen many times thought various wars and invasions over recorded history, and many more violent conflicts before recorded history.

But because the reality that nobody has more of a right to any thing than anyone else does is not convenient, especially to those people that have successfully managed to occupy land, then this fiction of ownership was given to the current occupiers.

Now I'm not saying that this fiction of "ownership" is a bad thing. But it's certainly not the kind of inalienable right you think it is. And it's certainly the business of government to determine the parameters of that fiction. Because without government that fiction doesn't exist.

The first transcontinental railroad took less than 10 years to build -- considerably less. Before doing something like this, figure out why the hell it's going to take 30 years, and fix that first.

The first railroads were intended as a way to get from place to place, and hence they actually had to be completed in a sensible amount of time in order to operate and recoup their costs (though I believe they struggled to do so?). These new railroads appear to be intended as a jobs program for union workers, so the longer they take, the better.

The first continental railway wasn't going 300 miles per hour. Basically, anywhere they could put tracks at an inclination that was feasible for the locomotives to haul carriages over, was good enough. Now try making tracks that won't bump a train off at 300 mp/h. You need a lot more precision for that. That's why it will take longer to build. Sure, you can accelerate that by adding more monkeys to the equation, but the amount of extra money that would take, would make the project even more expensive. You c

Actually, the Trans-Continental Railroad did have environmental studies (they used different terms in the 1870's) and there was real opposition to the concept.... both from federal money being spent towards the endeavor as well as some groups of people who opposed even the notion of a railroad as anything other than a pipe dream. The environmental concerns were certainly different in the late 19th Century, but it was still an issue.

The one thing that made the cost tolerable was the granting of land to the railroad companies who built the lines. One "township" of land (a 6 sq. mil by 6 sq. mile block) was given to the railroads on alternating sides of the route, on the premise that the railroad companies could in turn sell the land as a means to partially recover costs and to guarantee a source of revenue. Indeed far more land was given away and sold through railroad companies than was ever actually obtained through other federal land grant programs like the Homestead Act. It is also one of the reasons why the railroad companies emerged by the end of the 19th Century as the primary source of capital for America.

The building of that railroad also was full of all sorts of graft and corruption, including various games being done to decide where "mountains" began (tracks through mountain ranges paid more per mile than over flat ground), not to mention how the initial investors into the railroad companies literally blew all of their money on lobbying efforts in Washington DC before the first track was even laid down on the ground.

Not widely recognized either, it was one of the last major acts of the Abraham Lincoln administration, and nearly the last piece of legislation signed by him as well. The politics that went into the Trans-Continental Railroad would easily be recognized today, and really is no different than this railroad to nowhere in California. All that has really changed is the names of the people involved, and oddly even that hasn't changed as much as you would think it should. It even had the entire congressional delegation from California working on this one project in one way or another, and the governor of California even making a trip to Washington in order to secure the funding for that railroad.

And in the long run, the trans-continental railroad was a good thing for the country. So are you agreeing that in the long term the high speed rail will also be worth it?

Personally, I'm undecided. I would love to have access to high speed rail to SF, I would certainly use it, but Californians in general have a strange love for driving themselves everywhere. One concern is if the TSA gets themselves involved in railroad security, that would ruin the major speed and convenience advantage that rail has over air.

In the long run, anything that deters people from polluting the air and hogging vehicular bandwidth for the sole purpose of being able to get to the office angry and unproductive would have to be a good thing for the country. Well, assuming rational people. But then would rational people have opted for polluting the air and hogging vehicular bandwidth for the sole purpose of being able to get to the office angry and unproductive?

I have colleagues who live in the bay area and work a couple of days a week in LA, flying down from Oakland or San Jose. Make the ticket prices similar to SW Airlines and stations in accessible locations, and many of them will prefer the train. By 2033 though, I bet the cost of airlines has increased significantly due to demand for crude oil (or scarcity if you believe we're past peak oil).

IMHO, sooner or later we're going to need a high speed rail, but it might be better to wait until "later". Right now it's just not cost effective because not enough people would ride it.

I don't think it would be so bad if we waited 15-20 years to start building it. By then, fuel costs and congestion should be bad enough that people will be begging for it and investors will be lining up to finance it.

Also, a *significant* part of the cost of building it right now is that we don't have enough money to finish

If it's going to be needed later, why not build it now? As it is, the plan for completion isn't for another 22 years! That's certainly "later" in anyone's book. And some way beyond most guesses for peak oil.

I don't think it would be so bad if we waited 15-20 years to start building it. By then, fuel costs and congestion should be bad enough that people will be begging for it and investors will be lining up to finance it.

And the fuel costs will also bump up the cost of building the railroad.

UK and France have high-speed trains that go between major cities (If you consider InterCity 125mph high speed, France has SNCF).The only downside I'll say about the UK trains is that they are overcrowded through demand. Train companies keep raising fares to deter passengers, rather than invest in new rolling stock. France don't have that problem.

California does have Caltrain that goes between San Jose and San Franscisco. You could walk down to the train station in one city, travel for 15 minutes, and be an

You are forgetting the 'when'
This hypervolume takes into account the time it took to build the railroad from the reference frame perspective of a traveler waiting for it to be built (at rest, thus) so as to be able to take the train

"The first transcontinental railroad took less than 10 years to build"

In no small part due to the use of Chinese laborers that were banned from panning for gold- and the lack of consideration before the removal of Indians from the territories nearby.

I will assent that more than 27 miles per yer is more than doable though...

By the time the crews got experienced with the Trans-Continental Railroad, they were laying down about 20 miles of track per day. Yes, that was over flat ground that was unoccupied, but it does make you think how a similar kind of project could be organized. For several billion dollars, you would think you ought to be able to match that kind of performance... certainly more than a few miles per month.

The type of rail that was laid down was just wooden beams, rivets, and track. Over flat terrain, say Kansas, you could lay something like that down with some pretty good speed. What about the bridges and blasting to put the tracks through difficult terrain?

However, we are talking bullet trains now. Considerably more engineering goes into the same mile of track. We are talking about 500+ mph. The tolerances and requirements don't make it unreasonable to say it takes

Conventional maglevs are very expensive, yes. An Inductrack [wikipedia.org] based system would be far cheaper though, and may be cost competitive with the proposed high speed rail. The ECCO cargo maglev proposal [portoflosangeles.org] estimated an Inductrack maglev to be competitive with highways based on throughput. (It would require an 8-lane highway to provide the same throughput, and that isn't cheap either. See page 116.) Obviously, this is not directly comparable, but the point is that maglev isn't necessarily as outrageously expensive as most people assume.

That said, when you aren't moving bulk cargo, a PRT [wikipedia.org] system like Skytran [wikipedia.org] may be more attractive yet. Furthermore, the speed of a maglev is primarily limited by air resistance. Systems like ETT [wikipedia.org] use evacuated tubes, and "proposed speeds are up to 350 mph (560 km/h) for in-state use and up to 4,000 mph (6,400 km/h) for cross country and global travel."

The land had temporary inhabitants which were hunter-gatherers that didn't have notions of fixed property rights. There were "territories" that were somewhat fluid from year to year or even according to the seasons, but it wasn't the same thing as land with marked boundaries (with a fence, road, or river marking the difference from one parcel to the next) or something "domesticated" for agricultural purposes.

I'm not saying that it was correct in terms of simply going out and claiming huge tracts of land fo

The land had temporary inhabitants which were hunter-gatherers that didn't have notions of fixed property rights. There were "territories" that were somewhat fluid from year to year or even according to the seasons, but it wasn't the same thing as land with marked boundaries (with a fence, road, or river marking the difference from one parcel to the next) or something "domesticated" for agricultural purposes.

So the railroad-layers stole some of that land from them, and the settlers stole more, until there was no land to be hunter-gatherers on.

Between the x-ray powered strip searches, the paranoid interrogations, and sexual molestations by abusive, angry pedophile wannabe mall cops, only masochists and boot lickers will want to ride in what could have been a beautiful piece of engineering. I'd rather drive in relative freedom than take a bullet train and be humiliated, brutalized, violated, and treated like an inmate. To quote the Elephant Man, "I am not an animal!".

If the TSA could be kept away, then it would be great. But that isn't going to happen.

You can object to TSA practices - the violation of privacy, the ineffectiveness, and the rare but flagrant acts of sadism or molestation - without the pointless exaggeration. To hear you talk I'd be much safer and more comfortable wearing a "Democracy Now!" through Pyongyang Station than I would be boarding a California bullet train.

Blathering about pedophilia, fascism, and interrogations just makes your objections sound like paranoid ravings. Yes, you must be persistent, passionate, and creative in protecting your rights and protesting their violation, but above all you must be rational.

Your words are nothing but a disservice to anyone fighting for the Bill of Rights: it makes their job much harder when their rational objections become conflated with the rampant hyperbole and absurdly loaded language of people like you.

Rare acts of sadism or molestation? You do realize that the molestation is going to apply to everybody, right? They're still phasing it in, but the intention is to send everybody either through the scanners or for an enhanced patdown. Normally if a stranger is using his/her authority to touch children or adults like that it's considered sexual assault.

Different legal regimes. It's easier in some countries than in others to expropriate land for public purposes. It's also easier to oppose government actions with lawsuits in the US than in many other countries.

The US indulges an enormous collection of elites and their pressure groups that preclude or impede most development rather effectively, and common folk tacitly support this sort of governance (see NIMBY, BANANA, etc.) after they achieve their desired level of comfort. We call this 'environmentalism' and beat each other over the head with it.

Another reason is that US constitution established strong property rights and prescribes specific criteria and obligations for 'takings' by government. Some people believe that strong property rights has led to great prosperity and liberty. Others believe those people are evil capitalist pig-dogs that must skinned alive and slow-roasted in front of their offspring as a lesson to all.

European high speed rail connections are not limited by borders, of course going from one city to the next is cheaper than building one huge rail with only two stops, 520 mile rail is not extremely long. The high speed rail makes sense where the travel time is competitive with airplane travel time and population centers have demand to travel between them. California is great place for high speed rail, very sparsely populated land with huge cities along the coast. San Diego - Los Angeles - San Francisco - Sacramento train would cover big parts of California, extend that to Las Vegas, Portland and Vancouver with more stops on the way and you have all west coast covered.

I will certainly ride this train if it actually gets built. But it's a really, really dumb idea, and what we're likely to end up with is a train that goes from nowhere to nowhere because public support evaporated when the bill came due.

And remember, this is the state that cancelled dental insurance for poor people because it ran out of money.

This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

It would make a hell of a lot more sense to link the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, BC corridor with high-speed rail, since these are all cities where one can actually get around reasonably well without a car. It'd be a game-changer to have TGV-speed rail on that corridor - one hour between the downtown cores of Portland and Seattle, or Seattle and Vancouver? I've had regular, daily intracity commutes longer than that.

This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

That also means that all flights between SF and LA don't make any sense because any airplane traveler arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

Populations of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver are less than Los Angeles alone-- almost less than San Francisco metro area.

For California, the rail project could make living in godforsaken places like Fresno or Bakersfield viable for more people, reducing stress on other major metropolitan areas and encouraging economic growth.

Specific to Los Angeles, they need to expand Metro and create more local transportation hubs. This is independent of any inter-urban transportation projects. Maybe things like zip

Yes, high speed rail is going to be expensive. Yes, it's now projected to cost much more than the original estimate. (The cost has largely increased due to delays (the longer it takes to build a project, the more it costs), particularly fuelled by NIMBY appeasement ("We don't want the train passing near our house!" "But it is much quieter than standard trains and will increase your property values by being near an HSR station." "Build a tunnel!" "Okay, we'll build a tunnel." "The costs on this project are ballooning!").)

But you have to compare the cost to the alternatives. California's freeways and airports are jammed. With increasing population and mobility, something to move people around will have to be built. And the estimated costs to add volume to airports and highways is estimated to be $100-billion as well [cahsrblog.com].

And, to top it off, high speed rail runs on an operational profit. (This means that yearly revenues are higher than yearly costs.) Everywhere. Yes, high speed rail lines run an operational profit in Japan and France [miller-mccune.com], Spain [nytimes.com], Russia [cahsrblog.com], Taiwan [cahsrblog.com] and car-loving-and-train-hating America [businessinsider.com]. In Britain all rail is private, and for-profit companies are in fierce competition to pay for the rights to run rail services, which are barely at HSR levels if at all. It's a strongly held misconception that rail travel is unprofitable: HSR makes a profit all over the world, and it usually subsidizes local and regional rail transport (which the US has much of).

And though only the Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon line have paid off all their construction costs, that's because they're the oldest HSR lines; others are on track to in the future. Which modes of transportation don't pay off their construction costs? Oh, that's right, nearly all roads. Remember Carmageddon/The Carpocalypse, when an overpass outside LA was torn down, shutting traffic for the weekend? That was all so they could widen the highway through a mountain pass. Were the anti-HSR people asking for ridership studies for the Sepulveda Pass? Were they asking for the expansion to run an operational profit, let alone an overall profit? Of course not; only rail is subjected to such standards.

Add to this that a train is much more efficient in transporting this number of people, from an energy, environmental and economic perspective, and this is using studies that are assuming that gas prices will be relatively stable over the next few decades.

Obviously there still has to be overview of the project, making sure money is being spent efficiently and for best value. But the entire transportation sector needs to be looked at from this viewpoint. Airlines can work with rail to transport their passengers on their "last mile", freeing up their planes for more profitable medium- and long-haul routes, like done in Germany (Frankfurt Airport has two train stations). Road funds can be diverted to repairing our existing infrastructure as opposed to building more asphalt that needs to be maintained. And everyone will get to where they are going sooner. If this is done, North America will look back 20 years from now, not wondering "How could they do this?", but instead "How did they wait so long?"

Were the anti-HSR people asking for ridership studies for the Sepulveda Pass? Were they asking for the expansion to run an operational profit, let alone an overall profit? Of course not; only rail is subjected to such standards.

This is an important point, and one that needs to be repeated over and over. The money the US and state governments spend on rail is a tiny fraction of what we spend on roads and air transportation. I mean, it's pocket change by comparison. And yet there seems to be a visceral negative reaction to rail on the part of a large number of people -- any kind of rail, whether local or long-distance -- that is all out of line with the numbers. It's particularly odd given our country's history, and the fact that the same people who gripe the loudest about any new rail project tend to be the ones who wave the flag at every opportunity.

The state of California is populated with a bunch of morons who keep trying to vote themselves unicorns and rainbows and the idiots in Sacramento don't have the balls to actually do their jobs so the budget never gets balanced and the taxes keep going up. California has the highest overall taxes in the entire country. One of the highest state income taxes (about 9%), one of the highest sales taxes (about 8%), one of the highest corporate taxes (about 9%), and excessive fees for just about everything. Because so much money is predestined for someone's pet project (because of stupid ballot initiatives), there will NEVER be enough money to pay for the necessities. The train is just par for the course. The initial track will connect two places that no one in their right mind ever wants to go to, and the remainder will probably not be built in our lifetime.

I was born and raised in California. I'm still here because I'm a tech worker and this is where most of the tech jobs are concentrated. I've watched my state get shoved into the waste bucket by the people who live here and am sick of this shit. For years I've lived by a simple rule when it comes to the ballot. I vote no for anything that forcibly allocates money. No exceptions. I also vote no on all bond measures as I do not believe it is moral to pass the big fucking bill to our children. I also vote no on all tax increases because we're already paying too much (see above).

go to Japan, test it on the line Tokyo-Osaka-Kyushu. The lines have to be chosen carefully, but if you connect megacities with it, then it can be a major economic factor. 100 billion dollar may sound a lot, but it actually isnt. it its operated over 30 years, then this is $8 million per day which you have to get in or subsidise. If you hav 500000 people per day using it, then thats $20 per ticket. 500000 Is the number of people riding per day on the Tokaido Shinkansen. $20 means (at my current rate) that the train has to save me 15 Minutes of my time. And hell, yeah, it did that when i liven in Japan. Going to the next airport (always outside the city), onto a previously booked ticket, waiting for a delayed flight with unreasonable security waiting lines, to the destination city and then have restriction when to travel back was a lot more troublesome than just stumbling into the train station whenever i want, catch a train withing the next 20 minutes without booking before, going many times close to the city center, and returning whenever i wanted.

The economic meaning of the shinkansen for the cities between is incredible. Cities which would otherwise suffer a never-ending drain of companies and young people into the two megacity area are sustainable *only* because of a shinkansen stop nearby.

HSR is an investment to the post peak oil future. When Jet A1 fuel costs $5 per liter only the extremely wealthy can afford to travel by air. I hope you Americans are not counting on that, everybody is rich in future?:) Meanwhile the others (and you!) are landlocked either to low speed electric-hybrid cars or low speed trains, that is if you don't start building HSR now . The question here is that do you Americans want to continue your lifestyle of affordable travel after the fossil fuels are out of question, or do you want to isolate yourselves and remove the last of your competitive features: affordable movement of people and goods?

But then again - "Americans, yes they are that stupid".

What would happen if USA neglects building heterogeneous transport networks and stays on the current trend of fossil fuel automobiles and planes? It is not the end of the world after the oil gets too expensive for transportation. If only you can keep the agriculture running you will not starve and private enterprises will built HSR and electric induction roads very fast. The bad thing is that at that time the rest of the world have those and you are late, so very late that I am afraid someone else has the technological and political leadership in this world. As a North European I wouldn't like to see that happen. America(USA) means a lot to me and I want see you leading the world in the future too.

I'm surprised no one brought it up but the comfort level of a west european train ride is amazing. You get leg room, you get a tabletop in front of you that is nothing like the plastic pos on a plane. You can walk about, visit the toilet and go get a meal whenever you feel like it. You get plugs and often internet for your laptops. If it's an overnight ride you can get a sleeper. A well organized train ride basically means the travel time is not wasted at all, in some sense rendering the journey free as in time. You actually can continue living on the train, with rest, food and work available. How does that compare to being stuffed in economy class or wasting away behind a wheel?

You are correct... The Prop 1A only accounted for California's contribution. The $98-99 billion represent the "new" projection for the TOTAL project. The original $37-40 billion price tag was based upon the CHSRA original 2005 cost projections. It took pressure from the California legislature demanding new cost projections to force the CHSRA to admit to a $98-99 billion price tag in 2011 reality. The fact that California is "fiscally challenged" and Washington is not in the spending mood, make the HSR project a questionable proposition (albeit, not dead).

It is a misconception that the increase in the cost estimate was due to delays. Not true - two independent business school studies projected a much higher price tag quite a while ago. There is some truth to the NIMBY effect. However, there is no evidence to support the argument that property values will increase near the HSR. And, contrary to one of the other posters, the CHSRA has told more than one city, that it (CHSRA) would NOT fund any tunnels. So, that higher price tag has little to do with "tunnels".

The bond, Prop 1A from 2008 [wikipedia.org], approved roughly $8.5 billion to begin the project, with a total budget of $33 billion to be used if the project could be shown to be able to run without subsidies from the government. The most recent estimates, which still show a ludicrously high number of riders (between 60 and 90 million per year) show that the budget will need to be $98, which is roughly triple the $33 billion original allocated for the project.

The project is in no way feasible for a state as deep into the red as California. The *only* logical explanation of why this is still going through is to allow those already riding the $8.5 billion gravy train to keep it going for another $90 billion.

The original $33 billion estimate was in 2008$. The current estimate of $98.5 billion is in year of expenditure dollars, which is the same as $65.4 billion in 2010$. So the price has only doubled, not tripled. The original submitter made the same mistake.

Meanwhile, the alternative to spending this $98.5 billion (YOE$) is spending $171 billion (YOE$) to build an additional 2,300 lane-miles of highways, 4 runways, and 115 airline gates [ca.gov] just to move the same number of people! So the only thing more expensive than building high speed rail is not building it.

It could have a little something with Californians voting on propositions to put caps on their taxes.

Seriously, it's like telling people who are filling out their tax returns, "Just pay whatever you want".

Of course, they still demand all the services.

Plus, Californians send a lot more money to Washington in Federal taxes than they get back. Somebody's got to pay for the "Texas Miracle" after all. All those government jobs Rick Perry created don't come free.

>The "Miracle" where Rick Perry used federal stimulus funds to balance his states budget and increased unemployment by hiring a lot of minimum-wage and government workers. You hear it called the "Texas Miracle" on AM Radio talk shows to indicate that Rick Perry's flavor of socialism is far superior to the one we have in Washington.

Exactly, California all by itself is the 8th most productive economy in the world..California suffers from 2 things, the money that goes out through taxes to help the other 49 states (shouldn't someone scream communism ? ^_^), and stupid voters that want to pay less taxes all the while keeping the level of public services intact.The first one can't be fixed short of a new civil war, the second problem on the other hand can be fixed. There just is no political will to do it.

Who are "they", and which "services" are you alluding to? Also, there are plenty of states which have no income tax at all, yet for some odd reason they seem to do okay (via taking their money from other sources of taxation).

Plus, Californians send a lot more money to Washington in Federal taxes than they get back..

Given the sheer number of representative and electoral votes they represent at the federal level, they certainly do get it back in quite a few other ways, no?

Given the sheer number of representative and electoral votes they represent at the federal level, they certainly do get it back in quite a few other ways, no?

You just brought out one of the worst problems in our system of democracy and made it out as if it were a good thing for California (it's not). California gets the same proportion of representatives in the lower legislative branch as every other state in our nation. That means the voters in the state have no more power/representation than any other voter in any other state. However, California only gets 2 representatives in the upper house (the senate), where as Oregon gets 2 representatives in the upper house as well. This means every 250,000 voters in Oregon get their own senator, where as every 20,000,000 voters in California get their own.

The proportional power of a voter in Oregon is approximately 80 TIMES more than a Californian's (in the Senate). Another way of putting it: California, the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined. This means the population of those 21 states each individually have as much power as the population in California.

I don't understand how you made that out to be a benefit to California. On a side note, this disproportionate representation is a factor in why our nation is categorized as "conservative" or "center-right" - because the majority of power in the Senate is held by rural populations.

How would it be possible for every state to give the govt money and have the govt give all the money back? Doesn't the federal govt use the money it's been given to pay for things like the military? I'm sure California isn't the only state that pays more to the govt then it receives back.

LA to Vegas would make more economic sense. But this whole enterprise isn't about making sense, it's about funneling pork to state politicians and their buddies backing them -- unions and corporations.

Even the unapologetically liberal LA Times is critical of this turkey of a project.

In twenty years, California will have swollen to perhaps 50million people, many of them taking the I-5 or US101 route from LA to the Bay area. I-5 is pretty much clogged now: imagine what happens if you have to continue to resize Oakland, San Jose, SF, Burbank, LAX, John Wayne, Palm Springs, Sacramento, and all of the other regional airports to accommodate grown-- along with the freeways. Something's going to give. Invest now, and the infrastructure is there. Don't invest, and it's going to get uglier than it is now.... much uglier.

before I was forced to retire due to ALS I had need to go down to a remote office in LA multiple times per month from the SF Bay area. Airplanes are quick once you leave the ground but the absolute living hell that is air travel made me dread the trip. Having a fast train is something I dreamed about since the month I spent in Europe on business. Totally stress-free "commute". Tie the fast line into municipal light rail like the widely used BART and San Jose light rail and you have a very successful merger of two huge metropolitan economies.

As a proud native Californian, I say get the fuck out. You probably took that job from a Californian because you are cheap, and now you're just one of those inbred, cornfed assholes driving up the property costs.

As a proud native Californian, I say get the fuck out. You probably took that job from a Californian because you are cheap, and now you're just one of those inbred, cornfed assholes driving up the property costs.... or, as the rest of the country says, "Welcome!"

If you do the math, you could GIVE everyone a plane ticket a year on Southwest and come out ahead. Someone needs to put up the reality check of what it actually costs per Resident per year to build and then operate.

Did you expand your analysis to the energy/pollution savings? And how does the cost/benefit stacks up against other ways to reduce energy consumption or pollution.

Bay Area and LA-area airports are at or near capacity, and will be bursting at the seams in the next 15-20 years. Expanding capacity by adding new runways or building new airports will cost tens of billions of dollars (DIA cost $3 billion, and that was for building an airport in the middle of nowhere almost 20 years ago that handles less traffic than LAX does). Furthermore, air travel can be affected by weather (fog, thunderstorms, in CA's case) that doesn't affect rail

And it costs a lot less to build and maintain that infrastructure than the boondoggle that HSR is gonna be.

Yes, because of course the government hasn't subsidized the airline industry and airport infrastructure for 75 years...

Here's a fun fact: Amtrak's funding is less than 1% of federal spending on transportation, and many rail lines in the US are privately owned.

High speed trains are electric, and electricity can come from renewable resources or nuclear. They don't require much energy to keep rolling, and they can use regenerative braking (like many public transit lines already do.) You know all those commercials on NPR about how cheap it is to move freight by rail? They're RIGHT.

Airplanes generate enormous amounts of pollution, and they put it in the worst place possible. Remember how nice the weather was for several days after September 11th? Turns out we affected the weather pattern when all air traffic was halted:

Here's a fun fact: Amtrak's funding is less than 1% of federal spending on transportation, and many rail lines in the US are privately owned.

Here's an even more fun fact [bts.gov]: passenger rail subsidies are 40 TIMES that of commercial aviation subsidies, on a per-passenger-mile basis. We pay a LOT of money to move people by train, compared to moving people via airplanes...

Why do you need 'impressive security'? The high-speed (up to 300 km/h ~180Mph) trains here in Germany have zero security, you literally just walk in from the street into the train station and get on. The only thing close to 'security' is conductors who come round and check your ticket, and if you don't have one and refuse to pay for one they might call the police and have them meet you at the next stop.

Really, think of high-speed trains more like extensions of the subway or mass-transit systems that operate

I like airplanes. I really do. Someday I'll fly one myself. But beyond that, air travel has it's own set of problems. Each airplane "ride" has this annoying process called "boarding and deplaning". It's the whole reason why you have to show up 1 hour early to the airport, and while your flight arrives at maybe 2pm, it still takes you 30 minutes to be on your way out of the airport. And that's all IF things go smoothly. Chances are a bag gets lost, somebody holds up the security line, etc.

No matter how hard you try, you can't argue against that. A transfer in a large sized airport will need at least 1 hour to make it assuming things go well. But usually you plan on a 2 hours between transfer just incase you're delayed for whatever reason. It doesn't matter where you are, this seems to be the norm all over the world for air passenger travel.

A train transfer on the other hand can be as short as however fast you can run to the next train. There's also none of that take-off and landing stuff. You can even line up outside the door as the train comes to a stop. A ticket purchase can also be made minutes before the actual departure. It is quite a trip to see a good working train system in action. I recommend it. We don't have much of it here in the states.

Now on the to the cost. There are certainly a lot of dumb reasons why the California HSR project is getting inflated. It basically boils down to two groups that I'll call "Not in my backyards (NIMBY)" and "Please in my backyard". The first is easy to explain, but it is mainly rich people and people like yourself that think the project is useless. So these people band together to prevent any meaningful progress happen. I'd say their strategy is akin to that of the GOP's strategy in congress (whine as much as possible so that nothing gets done). Rich people obviously don't want the project because it will change their communities along the proposed track lines. People like yourself don't want it because you don't think it is economical.

The strange thing is the farmers and small towns along the valley DO want the train. In many studies when HSR is built, small towns that get a trains stop actually see population and economic growth due to more people having access to the town. So this becomes a lot of bickering and whining for stations, some which may not even be worth the hassle in the initial segment.

Finally there's a lot of freight companies and FRA standards that make absolutely no sense. Not only does this affect HSR, but it also affects local passenger rail services. Our passenger rail trains are generally overweight due to "safety" rules enforced by the FRA on minimum weight.

So if you combine all of those factors, what we have is a lot of unnecessary needs to address factors just so that everyone in their municipality or interest can benefit. That means unnecessary tunneling where it is perfectly viable to be at grade. Unnecessary extra tracks. Unnecessary stations. Unnecessary train specifications.

But of course people like you have to make this political, make it black-and-white. "There is no viable HSR system" is obviously not the case when the rest of the world continues to expand passenger rail services. This project is obviously overweight, I agree with that, but let's at least understand what's wrong rather than fill it up with logical fallacies. It's quite obvious that's how many things are working out in this country. Everyone seems more interested in throwing up own straw-men rather than working together to do what's reasonable.

Fun observation, the interstate highway system is probably the most expensive public works project in history. Should that have been considered a boondoggle? From wikipedia: "The initial cost estimate for the system was $25 billion over 12 years; it ended up costing $114 billion (adjusted for inflation, $425 billion in 2006 dollars) and took 35 years."

If I had to run the project I'd certainly look at implementing a shorter initial segment with less oppositio

Right, that's exactly why no one would ever build a high speed rail system somewhere like Japan where they are also prone to earthquakes. Obviously a train getting derailed is the biggest concern in quake prone areas.

Speakin' of which, given the ungodly size of both metro areas, how the hell are they going to avoid having to tack on at least another hour or two at each end just to negotiate the traffic, comply with speed and noise regulations, impositions tacked on by every burg that surrounds SanFran and LA, etc etc etc etc etc. ?

You realize this isn't going directly to the heart of the city right..This will connect most likely at the end of the BART line in San Fran and North LA above the city. No where near the fault lines. And why haven't we had these problems with Amtrack or freight trains..

That sort of destroys the point of even building a high speed rail link. At least LAX and SFO are pretty close to the urban centers of the respective cities.

As for Amtrack and the freight trains, those go right into the urban centers even closer than the airports. CalTran has a stop that is right next to the stadium that the Giants play at and is in walking distance to Fisherman's Wharf (sort of... a bit of a walk but not too bad). Amtrack goes into the heart of Oakland just on the other side of the bay.

Various reasons - energy efficiency, trains are more likely to be able to go _right where you want to be_ rather than some flat spot 30 miles out of town, etc. And if we assume that one more transport-class airport would have to be built, that's more land area than the entire rail system required. (Case in point - Dallas/Fort Worth Airport is, IIRC, more acreage than a four-lane freeway from Dallas to Washington DC. Same with the big one in Montreal.) Also trains are more comfortable by at least an order of magnitude.

Just wait until airline tickets start reflecting the real cost of airline travel. You really think you can fly for 5 hours on $99?

Just flew from Santa Barbara to Seattle and back this weekend, on an airline who hasn't gone bankrupt (Alaska Airlines). $445 round trip, took 2.2 hours flight time, about 1.5 hours at each end. So all together, about 7.5 hours and $445.

Compare that with $238 round trip ($119 each way) for Greyhound bus service, that takes 21 hours each way.

And $796 round trip ($398 each way) for Amtrak, that takes 27 hours each way (yes, it's slower than the bus).

Passenger rail doesn't make much money, but there is an unhappy reason for this. Folks on the political right often like to point to rail as one of the grand failures of government. What they do not recognize is that one of the reasons passenger rail doesn't make money in this country is because the highway system is so heavily subsidized. The failure of rail isn't an example of fair competition, it is an example of a heavily lobbied government choosing one form of transportation at the cost of either choice or market requirements. Consider this:

The director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation, William S. Lind, agrees that America’s love affair with subsidized interstates made private passenger rail unviable. Lind points out that even in 1921 the federal government spent $1.4 billion on highways, and by 1960 the outlay was $11.5 billion. By 2006, 47,000 miles of interstates had been built at a cost of $425 billion.

When critics of passenger-rail subsidies, such as Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute, suggest that the highway costs are mostly covered by the gas tax, Lind counters with figures from a 2008 Federal Highway Administration paper: the FHA reports that highway user fees, including gas taxes, only cover 51 percent of costs. By contrast, Amtrak in 2010 covered 67 percent of its operating costs from ticket fares and other revenue.

The above quote was written by a conservative arguing for rail. Your "Damn those liberals and their lying propaganda!" line is, I'm afraid, very often accurate. It is sad that so many on the right are so ready to defend the federal highway systems and automobiles against all other alternatives. Certainly, there are many things to recommend cars and good highways, but currently the funding of these systems is a subsidy for corporations who rely on externalizing the cost (on taxpayers) of long distance transportation, e.g. Wal-Mart, to the detriment of local businesses and small competitors. I call this sad because conservatives, and on this account I will accept the appellation myself, claim to favor traditional patterns of life and to be skeptical of the kind of federal subsidies which support business models which might otherwise fail. The loss of rail and the rise of cars was a blow to small town civic life. Thereafter, the bypass ("It's a bypass. You've got to build bypasses!") and the big box stores, always by externalizing their costs and frequently with the help of imminent domain laws, further eroded civic life and economy.